wearables-for-good

The world of technology, for all its faults, does have a notable philanthropic edge: think Bill Gates and his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or Mark Zuckerberg’s $990m donation in 2013 to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Frequently, this also spills over into the actual use of technology for charitable ends – technology for good, if you like – with internet.org (of which Zuckerberg is a member) trying to bring the internet to the world’s unconnected billions, a goal shared by Google’s Project Loon. Just this week, Facebook announced plans to spread free internet to Sub-Saharan Africa via satellite.

As you might imagine, this can get slightly controversial. No one would disagree that Loon and internet.org’s aims are pure. But there is a risk that the technology business can be seen as self-obsessed to the point of addiction, bringing the internet to billions when clean water would probably do more good.

As Bill Gates himself observed in a 2013 interview with the Financial Times. “Take this malaria vaccine, [this] weird thing that I’m thinking of. Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that’s great. I don’t,” he said.

A “Wearables for Good” initiative, then, might seem to fit squarely into the category of well intentioned but pointless tech do gooding, a wonky scheme to give Apple Watches to those who don’t need them.

But Wearables for Good is nothing of the sort. First of all, it is backed by Unicef, a Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning organisation that has a long and impressive history in development work.

What’s more, while “wearables” may be a current buzz word for the tech industry, Wearables for Good is not about the latest, shiniest tech, as Blair Palmer, Unicef’s innovation lead, explained to Wareable in August.

“One of the most important lessons that we have learned at Unicef when applying technology in the development sector is that the best tech doesn’t need to be the latest tech,” Palmer said.

“What we’re finding is that we’re taking the wearables industry down a different – and little-trodden – avenue. When designed specifically for the end-user, in a local context, wearable and sensor technology could revolutionise the way we deliver services to populations at the last mile.”

So what exactly is Wearables for Good? It is a challenge that, according to Unicef, “seeks to develop innovative, affordable solutions to make wearables and sensor technology a game-changer for women and children”.

“We are inspired by research in the field of wearable technology, and we see an opportunity to expand upon the concept of T4D (technology for development) by focusing on the potential applications of wearables in the developing world,” the organisation continues, stressing that these wearable solutions must serve “people in resource constrained environments”. Wearables for Good is also a competition, with two $15,000 prizes up for grabs.

Palmer said that her hope for Wearables for Good was “to anticipate this connected world and accelerate the positive effects of wearable tech solutions here and now…These need to be robust, sustainable, low cost and low-tech.” The 10 finalists, whittled down from 250 submissions across 46 countries, very much
bear this out.

Communic-AID, from students at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, is a wearable wristband with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology that will store emergency medical information for individual patients, keeping track of medications that have been distributed in a post-disaster context.

Also from the US is Droplet, a wearable water purification device in the form of a bracelet that was designed by two Portland technologists. The device uses a UV purifying light bulb that, when put in a container of collected water, kills contaminants and bacteria in minutes. Droplet also saves information about the water in question – contaminants, bacteria, where it was collected – in order to help prevent future water problems.

GuardBand is intended to protect children from abuse. The idea, the work of four Vietnamese students, consists of three parts: a water-resistant band that will collect data about the child’s health and location; a server, which collects this data for the use of aid organisations; and an app, which will update information on each child.

Khushi Baby is a collaboration between young entrepreneurs in the US and India. The system, currently being pilot tested by NGO Seva Mandir in 100 villages in rural Udaipur, consists of a mobile app for community health workers that interfaces with a digital necklace worn by patients via NFC. Health workers can scan a patient’s chip and read and update their health record without the need for connectivity to a central database, which can be difficult in rural areas.

Raksh, named after the Sanskrit word for “safeguard,” also originates from India, in this case four students from Chennai. It is a low cost (around $25) bluetooth-based, ear-worn multi-parameter monitoring platform, which can track a child’s respiration rate, heart rate, body temperature and the relative humidity of their breath in a way that is non invasive.

Soapen, a “a wearable and portable soap” to educate parents about the importance of hand washing, underlines the international appeal of the Wearables for Good competition: it was designed by three Indian students and one student from South Korea, who met while studying at Parsons School of Design in New York.

Their idea is about as far from the clichéd picture of wearable gadgets as you could imagine: Soapen consists of a crayon-like soap wrapped in paper, which can be peeled away to reveal more soap as it disappears with use. SoaPen marks the skin, with the idea being that parents will use the device to mark out “critical cleaning areas”, which the child will be motivated to wash off.

The teleScrypts team is similarly international, boasting members from the US, India, Ethiopia and Finland. Its mission is “to provide access to quality health care in rural areas” and it intends to do this, at least initially, through an app and health sensors that will allow doctors to diagnose patients remotely.

Termotell, the fruit of a US / Nigerian collaboration, is more specific in its goals: “to save the lives of children under five at risk of Malaria”. The product is a sensor-powered bracelet designed for children under five – “joyful, colourful and chewable” according to the team – which reads the child’s temperature and sweat patterns in real time, analyses the results and detects patterns that indicates the risk of Malaria. If it finds these patterns, Termotell will glow in the dark and send an alert to a specified phone. Once the child is taken to hospital, Termotell will then send the data it has collected to the doctor’s smartphone.

Totem Open Health, one of two finalists from Europe, is probably the most ambitious of the final ideas. It is, essentially, an open platform and ecosystem for wearable health technology, including sensors, data collection, storage, sharing, analysis and algorithmic interpretation. The team, who all come from the Hague, explain that the open nature of this system “provides opportunities beyond what is currently possible in proprietary closed health solutions, such as: unhindered collaboration, faster innovation, localised development, addressing low-volume niche problem areas, transparency and shared knowledge for the benefit of all”. The Totem Health Sensor Aurora, a small wearable device containing off-the-shelf sensors, is the first product in this ecosystem.

Last but not least is WAAA! – Wearable, Anytime, Anywhere, Apgar – designed by a team of academics and researchers from the University of Huddersfield. Apgar is the first test given to a newborn babies, typically done within minutes of birth, to quickly evaluate their physical condition and see if there is an immediate need for extra medical or emergency care. (It stands for “Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity and Respiration).

WAAA! is able to carry out these tests remotely, using soft patch sensors to transmit live Apgar data via mobile phone. Deteriorating responses in the newborn trigger an SMS text alert that is sent to the supervising healthcare worker, leading to an emergency medical response.

The winner of Wearables for Good will be announced on November 12 and our money is on Droplet or Termotell. But whoever wins, the sheer range of the 10 finalists is hugely impressive, swinging from the hyper specific to the general, the ultra high tech to the soap on a rope.

That tells us something very important about wearable technology in 2015. It’s not just that wearables can do good – although these ideas certainly show us concrete ways in which they can be a positive force – but the whole concept of a wearable device is far more varied that people generally realise.

Yes, wearables can be watches and fitness bands. But they are not just that. Wearables for Good shows that wearable devices can be anything from a water purifying bracelet to an in-ear monitor. And the sooner that message gets out, the sooner we will see the genuine potential of the wearables market.